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Inside the Black Box: Technological Innovation at Google http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zIaglJNPcY By: Jonathan Rosenberg SVP of Product Management at Google, Inc. |
- Hire great people
- don't have folks work remotely
- don't hire specialists (their output is usually lower and they are often inflexible)
- Accept ideas from everyone
- share ideas in crowds
- send an email, folks then vote which ideas get presented
- Sharing and Openness
- if you hire great people, share everything
- everything is stored on the intranet
- sharing is in the products as well (not like AOL platform)
- can't control the platform (consumers control the platform)
- Morph ideas, don't kill them
- blog systems are now engine for Google docs and spreadsheets
- convergence (the device in your pocket that does everything), not in devices, but rather in the cloud with the data
- Users come first, not money
- Google didn't know how to make money, but wanted to make search better
- don't focus on revenue at first
- users punish companies that do the wrong thing
- focus on the users
- Data drives all decisions
- don't come into a meeting with "I think"
- 2 projectors (one for presentation and one for the source data)
- argue everything about the conclusions from the data
- try a design online and then argue the result
- return on investment approach to everything
- Iterating Products
- when did engineers ever do it better then what was in a spec
- just get people working on a demo
- Vision
- Google has a mission to organize and store data
- 20% time (engineers are allowed to work on whatever they want)
- thinking big (OKR — objects and key results — only expected to reach 60%)
- define very big goals
- Bet on a trend or fail victim of one
- technology base case (Moore's law, law of storage, etc.)
- when gmail launched, they couldn't give everyone 2GB of storage, but they thought it would take a while for people to use the space and storage would be cheaper by then
- cell phone is a new trend (power, screen, GPS, etc.)
- Accept a smaller piece of a bigger pie instead of taking the whole pie
- focus on making the partners successful
- Feed the winners, starve the losers
- most companies start off with objectives
- think about the greater good
- Google is functionally oriented
- Avoid hippos
- hippos kill more projects in organizations
- hippo is the highest paid person in the room
- if you can see the org chart in the product, don't buy it
- Never surrender to the Lawyers, Accountants, and Bureaucratic folks
- cars where you hit I agree
- when you download a feature online and you have to click I agree
- they become a constraint (null set)
- never would of done images, books
- Reward innovation
- profit sharing doesn't work
- pay they people who make the money
- if someone says it isn't fair, who cares
- Learning how to learn